In Paragraph H, why does Gulledge make an analogy with heati…
In Paragraph H, why does Gulledge make an analogy with heating water on a stove? H As the oceans warm, they’re giving off more water vapor. “Everybody knows that if you turn up the fire on your stove, you evaporate the water in a pot more rapidly,” says Jay Gulledge, senior scientist at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), a think tank3 in Arlington, Virginia. During the past 25 years satellites have measured a 4 percent average rise in water vapor in the air. The more water vapor, the greater the potential for intense rainfalls. The amount of rain falling in intense downpours—the heaviest one percent of rain events—has increased by nearly 20 percent during the past century in the U.S. “You’re getting more rain from a given storm now than you would have 30 or 40 years ago,” says Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Global warming, he says, has changed the odds for extreme weather.